Realistic Orc

Hey! My name is Darleen and this is one of the projects I did during my education at PIXLVISN which I recently graduated. Since I was little I loved fantasy and all sorts of characters and creatures so I knew I wanted to do a fantasy project. I had a lot of fun working on this and learned a lot in the process. Enjoy a little breakdown of the project:

Realistic Orc - character project

Working with references is really important. The first step I did was collect references of the general idea of the creature, similar artstation projects and characters from movies and games. At the end of the project I had a big reference board with references regarding anatomy of different parts of the body, skin detail and texture.

MODELING

Doing the sculpt in Zbrush I did my best to stick to the anatomy references I collected. I started with a sphere and worked from the most basic shapes to more detailed shapes but not sculpting wrinkles and other fine detail yet. I also experimented with different looks and shapes, until I settled for the final design. I retopologized the model in Maya and projected the detail in Zbrush.

DISPLACEMENTS

primary (sculpted) displacement - combined (primary, secondary, tertiary, micro) displacement

I applied secondary, tertiary, and micro skin displacements in Mari using texturingXYZ scans.

In Zbrush I created the primary displacement map using the secondary map from Mari as base and sculpted bigger pores, wrinkles and other skin details.

TEXTURING

diffuse + sss - specular - coat - basecolor

For texturing I used Substance Painter where I baked ambient occlusion, cavity, thickness, and other maps based on a normal map I exported from my sculpted primary displacement from Zbrush. ​I used these maps to create a highly detailed basecolor map. It was very important to have enough references for texturing as well. The basecolor I wanted to have a lot of detail, so I spent a lot of time in Substance Painter layering all sorts of colors and hand painting detail. 

​In Substance Painter I used the thickness map and created a coat map to make different areas shinier, like on the nose and forehead.

Always keeping the different layers of the human skin in mind and working from the bottom/subdermis to the top of the skin in Substance Painter. ​

Matching the right amount of subsurface scattering to make the skin look realistic was a challenge. ​

LIGHTING

I created a three point lighting and after some shading on the skin and eyes I rendered the project in Arnold.

With all challenges I learned to overcome I am proud to have finished this project and with the knowledge I gained I cannot wait to start my next.

Groom by Jacqueline Köhnlein.

Eyes by flippednormals by artist Fareed Nagy.

email: [email protected]

linkedin.com/in/darleenfischer

artstation.com/darleen_fischer